The importance of conditioning your left wrist

Brodown

Member
I have a lot of threads before in the past few years complaining about my weaker hand, but the good news is I've managed to finally overcome it and really it was down to common sense.

Sometimes I thought I may need to use wrist strengtheners, or maybe I had carpel tunnel or not stretching enough. Well now I stretch my wrists every time I play of course but I also spend about 5-10 minutes solely on my left wrist playing quadruples accenting every 4th stroke L l l l L l l l L l l l L.

Also sometimes do 4 strokes in quick succession on the snare, then left tom, mid tom and floor tom repeatedly. Its not particularly exhilarating but spending these 5-10 minutes every time will make a huge difference to those who are having trouble with their weaker hand, it will improve most aspects of your drumming, from snare rolls to linear fills.

Also towards the end of the 10 minutes I do some LLLL RRRR excercises, still playing in fours, I think its much better to do it in quadruples then doubles or triples due to most of your fills being in 4/4 time presumably, usually doing 4 strokes per quarter note if you're playing sixteenth notes or maybe even faster.

Start off slow and make sure you accent well, currently I vary the degree of velocity with every accent I hit so on the eighth stroke I hit a slightly harder accent then the fourth, this will improve your control tremendously.
 
Cool. But you lead with the right and so accenting the first beat of each quad is counter to playing singles yes?

If you accented the 2nd or 4th beat would this be more natural?

lLll or lllL

Davo
 
One of the things that helped me fix my left hand was to add rests to my single stroke practice routine. I'm not certain who came up with this.

5/5/3 starting on the right:

RLRLR LRLRL RLR

5/5/3 starting on the left:

LRLRL RLRLR LRL

5/5/5/5

RLRLR LRLRL RLRLR LRLRL

Then a full measure of straight singles.

RLRL-RLRL-RLRL-RLRL

And back to the beginning.

I see a number of other students practicing their singles by doing 8-on-a-hand followed by an arbitrary number of measures where they 'blaze' singles for 5 minutes. While that was all well and good before I knew how to properly do a single stroke roll, the change up above really helped with a number of other things and relieved the boredom.

Give it a try, see if it works.
 
Two 10 min sessions per day, playing a shuffle, with just the left hand. Starting at 152 bpm and working up to 168 bpm over 5 weeks. My left hand is now much,much improved in both articulation and endurance.
 
Try Dom Famularo's The Weaker Side, 10.95, His book on strengthening the weaker side whether it be hands or feet. The man is a master and the book is all you need with a little time.
 
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